Converting DVI to Other Formats?

jgrr asks: "I'd like to be able to take a DVI file and convert it to some less palatable format, like MS Word. Some journals I want to submit papers to accept electronic copies as either MS Word or WordPerfect documents, not as TeX. (These are in ecology and zoology, not math journals). People I ask to look at papers don't use TeX either, and like to make the changes to the text itself, so PDF won't work. I know about latex2rtf, but I use some different packages and BiBTeX, and I'd rather not have to re-write the paper in Word after converting it. It seems like the DVI level is better than the TeX level for this, but I can't seem to find any existing software that does it. Any ideas?"

Comments

I had a similar problem

[b_pretender]

The best solution is PDF. LaTeX2html is okay if you can get away with html, and it handles equations the best of any (if converting to a GIF is best). 'tth' is nice, but again, only use it if html is acceptable. 'tth' changes equations into tables and symbol font, which is ideal for simple formulas but LaTeX2html is better for heavy complicated equations.

'ttm' will supposedly convert equations into MathML, but I doubt that the non-DVI/PDF/PS crowd will have anything on their computers to read MathML.

Everything that I ever converted to word/wordperfect, I had to rewrite the equations by hand. There is no other way about it.

Summary: If you are submitting a DVI file to a journal, and that journal requires MSWord, than you had better get a graduate student (they come cheap) to rewrite it in MSWord.

Re:I had a similar problem

[tunah]

Doesn't mozilla do MathML?

Re:I had a similar problem

[jovlinger]

pdftex generates nice results when it works, but seems to choke on the more advanced packages; typically the psfrag and listings.

Going to pdf via dvi is more robust, but you can get really shitty pdf quality unless you hack the default dvipdf command to use type 3 fonts. If you're unlucky it looks like it was sent via fax (~ 72 dpi). Not pretty.

A google search will set you straight.

Ugh.

[pmz]

It is genuinely irresponsible for journals to require Word or WordPerfect files.

TeX and its many add-ons provide a truly great and open resource for scientists to record their findings. It is widely available, text based, and non-proprietary. For those scientists who can't figure out a text editor, there are GUI front-ends to TeX. If there is too much resistence to using TeX, then use one of the SGML applications (e.g. Docbook, HTML). Just don't use Word, for cripes sake!

Re:Ugh.

[jilles]

Mostly editing of journals and conference proceedings is either non profit work or work that is done with a limited budget. Outside of the math community Latex is not used very much (it never was, for obvious reasons of lack of user friendliness).

Editors generally need editable formats. PDF is not very editable (especially pdfs generated from dvis, get those a lot and hate them). Latex is editable but is pretty hard to convert (been there, done that, cost me way too much of my time). Word, like it or not (personally I don't) is a format that can be read on most platforms, including unix variants. Most third party provided wordprocessors have import/export functionality for word that goes way beyond import/export functionality for latex (mostly non existing). Probably the first thing a professional editor does is import the word files into a professional DTP package (at least that's what I would do). Having to deal with tex would be a pain in this case because of all the \, {, } and other latex thingies you need to manually locate and replace by the proper alternatives. (not to mention stuff like reference citations and dealing with eps files that are hard to edit)

I mostly write my own stuff in framemaker. If needed, I can convert to word pretty quickly and meet relevant formatting instructions. Converting from either one to latex is something I will try to avoid since it is generally quite hard and takes a lot of time. Journals that require latex are getting pretty rare in my area of research (Software Engineering) mostly because most researchers in that area use macs/pcs. In the case I encounter a journal that wants tex I simply deliver in word. If they want latex they can typeset it themselves, I have better things to do.

BTW. all those people using latex because of the formulas: Open office now includes a formula editor that can read/write mathml. Converters to and from mathml exist for latex so you can migrate pretty easily. The formula editor itself doesn't look to bad either. OpenOffice is free and can export to word better than anything I've seen before.

what are you talking about?

[BoxedFlame]

You can edit PDF just fine. Get Acrobat (not Acrobat reader mind you).

Is .doc really required?

[rubinson]

I'm in the same boat. As a grad student in sociology, I write all of my papers in LaTeX even though all of my colleagues use Word or WordPerfect. I haven't had any problems so my first question is "Is Word really required?" (Unlike the corporate world, academics tend to have a lot of freedom.)

For my colleagues, I distribute my papers as either PDF or hardcopy. Most people want to edit on a hardcopy version anyway, so they just print off the PDF. Could you just ask your colleagues to edit a hardcopy format? They might be willing to; especially if you explain to them why you don't use a word processor.

Regarding journals, sociology submission guidelines also ask for a "word processor" format (which I read as "Word" or "WordPerfect"). However, I haven't seen any journals that require electronic submission. Most journals require that you send them either 4 or 5 copies of the article or an electronic submission. I prefer to send a hard copy format because that's what's going to be redistributed to the reviewers. And regardless of what anyone says, appearance is important and LaTeX provides a very professional appearance.

If it really is necessary to provide a Word document to your colleagues and/or journals, I think that you're SOL with regard to TeX. Unless I've missed something, TeX, LaTeX, DVI, PS, and PDF can't degrade to a lesser format without losing some, most, or all of the formatting.

In this case, I'd recommend looking into DocBook. I haven't used it myself but, from all accounts, it produces publication quality text. And, if I recall correctly, it can generate TeX, LaTeX, HTML, and RTF. I don't know if RTF can support everything that you would need (for example, I don't know if it can handle images). If it can, great; if it can't, you could always import the document into OpenOffice and go from there.

Since I'm also in academia, I'd be interested in hearing what you decide to do. I'd appreciate it if you could post a response or shoot me an email.

Re:Is .doc really required?

[E-prospero]

In this case, I'd recommend looking into DocBook. I haven't used it myself but, from all accounts, it produces publication quality text. And, if I recall correctly, it can generate TeX, LaTeX, HTML, and RTF.

I think you misunderstand what DocBook is. DocBook is an SGML/XML specification for annotating "booklike" documents. It is very similar to LaTeX is many respects. It is a text markup language, whose tags (chapter, section, part, etc) are suited to annotating content in a document. The only notable difference (other than syntax) is the absence of rendering information in a Docbook document. This step is performed by a document processor which converts the DocBook into HTML, PS, whatever.

Note, however, that this is what a LaTeX document should be like anyway - a LaTeX document itself should not contain display information, only content markup. The style sheet/class should be the sole source of rendering information.

The upside of Docbook is the syntax - it's XML style tags in the document, which makes the document much easier to parse using standard tools. It also has a tag set which completely omits any display related information.

The downside of Docbook is also is the syntax. XML tags are a pain to write by hand (in comparison to LaTeX style tags, anyway). The only way of alleviating this pain would be with a WYSIWYG tool for Docbook creation, but I can't say I know of any.

If someone is having problems with getting LaTeX accepted by a community, DocBook isn't going to solve their problem (if anything, it will marginalise them further). The only solution I can think of would be to find a tool that produces Word/WP documents from tagged/markup source, but I don't know of any such tool (RTF converters don't count - it's hamstrung as a document format when compared to LaTeX; you would be better served just loading the raw text into the word processor and converting it by hand).

Russ %-)

Re:Dont accept TeX?

[Sycraft-fu]

If they dont accept TeX, then tell them to shut their magazine and stay shut....!

Um, no. When you are trying to get your research published, you can't afford to be a bigot. You are in no position to dictate to them what they must accept. They tell you "If you want to be printed in our journal, here is what you must do." This is life. In the academic community, having your work published in journals is very important. It's now you get it disseminated and how you get your name recognised. You take a poor attitude, like the one you espouse, with the journals, they just won't publish your work. It's that simple. A single, small, researcher is not enough to force any kind of changes on them.

In the real world, it's the big dogs that dictate the way things get done. In the case of the research community, that is often the journals. You play by their rules or you don't get to play.

Using LaTeX outside the scientific world

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Interesting you mention the issue of (La)TeX being used predominantly by the maths community. (I assume you really mean "scientific", rather that just maths.)

I think LaTeX, at least, is a very under-rated tool for non-scientific work. Even if you don't need the equations and such, it still has excellent support for document structure, citations and cross-references, importing external data and indexing, all significant improvements over the closest equivalents in most word processing packages. The only serious letdown is the table support, which is very powerful, but about as user friendly as a '60s mainframe.

My girlfriend typeset her whole Masters thesis in LaTeX, on my advice and with a little help to start with. She'd never used it before, but is reasonably smart and computer literate. It took her perhaps a day or two to get used to it, then it became second nature to her.

In addition to the basic features mentioned above, since the subject matter of the thesis was Indian literature, we designed a whole font for her to represent the Hindi quotations in their native script. Again, after I showed her the basics, she was quite happy designing her own character set essentially from the ground up using METAFONT.

OK, it's a fairly specialised subject matter, but LaTeX was just the right tool for the job. Using Word would have been a nightmare by comparison, and in contrast to the pre-historic software the rest of her department use to typeset Hindi text -- at a rate of about five seconds per character via a particularly nasty GUI -- its usability was fantastic...

I realise that you said LaTeX is not used "very much" outside the math community, but I would suggest that's as much through lack of awareness as "unfriendly user interface". Anyone who's writing papers is likely to be clever enough to pick up basic LaTeX pretty quickly, whatever their field. I've taught it to several people now, and I think every single one preferred it once they'd got past the first week's inevitable "how do I do <something simple>?" phase. And of course, given the plentiful support resources available (some excellent books, the comp.text.tex newsgroup, etc.) they can continue to use it now without any further help from me.

Re:Using LaTeX outside the scientific world

[jilles]

I'm in a computer science department as well. Indeed most of the computer scientists are using Latex because of one reason: mathematical formulas. However, I'm part of the software engineering group within that department and typically our papers do not contain much formulas. Internally we use framemaker (which has an adequate formula editor BTW). Most of the relevant conferences in our area (e.g. OOPSLA, Ecoop, ICSE, TOOLS) have long resorted to pdf and actually receive a mixture of pdf, ps and word documents. Some of the smaller conferences (e.g. SPLC) are even recommending word as the format of choice and are providing templates and such.

Many of the journals in that area have not made the move away from Tex yet but increasingly they are forced by their authors (who predominantly submit non Tex documents) to also accept other formats. Converting between tex and other formats has always been hard, so increasingly Tex becomes more unfeasible on the editors side as well. Editing conference proceedings consists of putting PDFs in the right order, however journals still require some additional editing. Doing that in Tex when most of your content comes in the form of word documents is foolish.

I've been involved with the organization of two conferences now. I can assure you that doing the conference proceedings in Tex would not have been possible since most of the stuff we accepted was not written in Tex. In fact my biggest headaches were poorly generated pdfs from tex documents. Apart from being large files consisting of pregenerated bitmaps, there were also issues with fonts and graphics which caused our HP printer to choke on it more than once. Proper tools for generating pdf from latex exist, but evidently are not widely used.

Most people outside the math community (including of course the other formula heavy communities like computer science, physics, etc.) use word or similarly feature rich word processors. Latex doesn't have these features, nor do adequate conversion tools for latex exist (i.e. tools that preserve structure, crossreferences, formatting and graphics). There are some frontends for latex, none of which have impressed me very much in the past. Lack of features, user friendliness and conversion tools are the main reason that people who do not explicitly need it do not use latex. I'm sure there are a handfull of sociologist who use latex but I'd be very surprised if more than 1% of all sociologists would even know what latex is.

I'm sure latex is excellent for handling exotic things like custom Hindi fonts but most users don't need that. On top of that, MS word is pretty good in non western scripts such as arabic, hebrew, chinese and japanese (and maybe even Hindi). I'm pretty sure VI/emacs are not prepared for that kind of work since, like Latex, they are ascii oriented (not even unicode). Of course given prehistoric hard/software, linux/latex is probably a very good option, no argument there.

Re:Using LaTeX outside the scientific world

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Most people outside the math community (including of course the other formula heavy communities like computer science, physics, etc.) use word or similarly feature rich word processors. Latex doesn't have these features, nor do adequate conversion tools for latex exist (i.e. tools that preserve structure, crossreferences, formatting and graphics).

Interesting perspective. :-)

I'd say feature-for-feature, LaTeX is more than a match for Word in just about anything. It has at least as much power for generating routine document structuring (headings, lists, footnotes, headers and footers, cross-references, citations, tables and indices, etc.) and without the bugs that have plagued, say, Word's bullets and numbering dialog since forever.

Sadly, I have to concur about the conversion tools, though. I assume that's why so many papers and journals in scientific fields still ask for input as (La)TeX. That way, putting it all together is a breeze. If someone goes and starts using nasty proprietary formats that are format-based rather than structure-based, as frequently happens with Word docs, it's no wonder they have trouble.

I'm sure there are a handfull of sociologist who use latex but I'd be very surprised if more than 1% of all sociologists would even know what latex is.

I'm sure plenty of them know what latex is. LaTeX is another matter, of course. ;-)

I'm sure latex is excellent for handling exotic things like custom Hindi fonts but most users don't need that. On top of that, MS word is pretty good in non western scripts such as arabic, hebrew, chinese and japanese (and maybe even Hindi).

My point wasn't the Hindi specifically, but rather the fact that, given a fairly extreme requirement for advanced typesetting, LaTeX was more than up to the job. You can do foreign character sets, mathematical equations, chemical formulae, pretty program listings, some awesomely powerful diagrams, and much more, all with packages that have already been created and/or a little work. That kind of flexibility just doesn't exist in word processors; as far as I'm aware, Word doesn't have a decent answer to any of the above. That's why typesetting is still more powerful, and a better choice for arbitrary material for journals, conference papers, and the like. Of course, it only works if everyone sings off the same hymn sheet, which is where the problems lie these days.

And just by the way, the foreign text handling in Windoze apps is abysmal. Microsoft's own typesetting website is quite professionally done, and they're clearly trying to get a half-decent system for entering foreign text on a UK keyboard in place, but the examples on their web site don't make sense. That unfortunately betrays the fact that the people working on this stuff don't actually know what the real target is -- they're computer people, not language people. In contrast, both creating the glyphs and setting up the rendering so that you could type the standard roman alphabet transliterations was a breeze in LaTeX, probably because the tools have mostly been designed by the people who will actually be using them.

On reflection, I can see a lot of parallels between LaTeX and Linux here. Both had one guy start the avalanche, both now have active and passionate user communities who keep the ball rolling, both can produce far better results than the mainstream alternatives if used well, but both are consigned to remain forever somewhat on the sidelines just because they're different. Ah, well. At least those of us in the know can benefit. :-)

Re:Using LaTeX outside the scientific world

[E-prospero]

Most people outside the math community (including of course the other formula heavy communities like computer science, physics, etc.) use word or similarly feature rich word processors. Latex doesn't have these features, nor do adequate conversion tools for latex exist (i.e. tools that preserve structure, crossreferences, formatting and graphics).

Ironically, these "features" of word processors are the biggest hurdle to overcome in publishing. From the publishers perspective, the author should have NO control over the formatting etc or the article to be published.

For example, the IEEE accepts documents in almost any format, including Word, Wordperfect, LaTeX, and hardcopy. When a document is received for publication, the first step taken is to RETYPESET the ENTIRE document (for the record, in SGML). Any formatting information is summarily lost in the conversion process (which is performed by automated text stripping tools).

This display agnostic perspective is exactly what LaTeX promotes: the author has limited control (or should have, with a good style sheet) over the appearance of a document. The author should stick to what they are good at - writing up results.

I severely doubt there is a single serious publishing house that uses Word as their desktop publishing solution. If there is any preference for Word as a submission format, its probably because they have their automated tools already set up to strip text out of Word, and into whatever tools they use internally.

On a personal note: I had the experience of publishing a set of conference proceedings a few years back for a small student conference. From my experience, the single greatest obstacle in producing the proceedings was Word, and its "helpful" auto-typsetting. If I had my time over, the first thing I would have done would be to strip the text from documents, stick it into LaTeX, and write a good style sheet.

Russ %-)

Re:Dont accept TeX?

[t]

This is not insightful.

This is arguing that "my vote doesn't count".

Or that researchers should give all rights to their work to the publisher. Doesn't that ring a bell with anyone? To be clear, if you submit a paper to a journal, you can't even offer that paper for download on your own website! Yes that's right YOUR paper, YOUR research, can't be published on YOUR website.

For those of you who don't grok what I'm saying, go on and conform to whatever those "journals" request of you, but don't come crying to us when they require a butt-raping as part of the honor of getting your paper published.

t.